


Ghost Zoned Out

by guess ill die (Esplodeyoface)



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Creepy, Gen, Hospitals, How Do I Tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:53:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22237399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esplodeyoface/pseuds/guess%20ill%20die
Summary: “Shut up,” Danny snapped, sounding more real to himself than he had in weeks. The lights overhead flared and burst with a sharp popping noise.Dash flinched back, letting go of his shoulder. “Fucking freak! Get the hell away from me!”Danny wanted to snipe back that Dash was the one who started this whole damn thing, but he and his cronies had fled already. The bell to sixth period rang, and with a groan, he resigned himself to being late. Again.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 95





	Ghost Zoned Out

**Author's Note:**

> me:  
> my old hyperfixation on Danny Phantom: hey what if I just consumed you for like a day and then dropped out of mind for the next five months would that be fucked up or what
> 
> This fic exists entirely bc I had someone to talk to about it. We shall see if my resurfaced interests lasts long enough to get through the rest of the plot points we discussed lmao
> 
> I have never even read a dp fic. I don't know how they get tagged and also I did zero research. My Canon Now

It was cold. It was so cold he wasn’t even shivering, couldn’t move as he tried to open his eyes.

Darkness. Or maybe he hadn’t opened his eyes yet. He tried to say something, open his mouth and call out-- where was he before this? The memory swam in his head just out of reach. It had to have been important, right? He felt like it was.

Sudden light blinded him. He blinked against the light, cringing away from it as best as his stiff, unresponsive body could. A doctor was looking down at him, face almost completely obscured by the surgical mask and that weird hat surgeons wear to keep their hair contained. Something about the light in the room washed the doctor out, turning them a deathly shade of mottled blue-gray.

“Daniel Fenton, age fourteen,” the doctor said in an almost board monotone, looking him over. “Five foot four and a quarter, a hundred and seventeen pounds.”

“W-where am I…?” he finally managed to croak out, convincing his arms to work so he could prop himself up.

“The Morgue.” The doctor said simply, consulting a clipboard and scribbling something down.

Danny worked his jaw, trying to wrap his mind around that. He looked around, forcing his eyes to focus, vision blurry and swimming.

On either side of where he lay, the wall of freezers stretched on endlessly, grossly oversized filing cabinets for the dead. The sudden panic rising in his chest brought back his strength, and he pushed himself from the freezer tray he lay on, crumpling to the tiled floor.

The mortician looked on cooly, scribbling something else down onto their clipboard. “Right. Died on Saturday, September 12th, 2:55 pm during transit to the hospital. Cause of death: heart failure following electrocution.”

“What are you…” he tried to swallow, tried to take a breath. They both stuck in his throat.

“Take it easy, kid.” The mortician said. They set their clipboard down and grabbed Danny beneath the arms, hauling him up to his feet and sitting him on a stool, voice and movements somewhere in between impersonal and unconcerned. Like they were going through the motions. “Focus on a single function at a time.” They them took his head between their hands, turning it this way and that. “Almost entirely intact. Clean exit from the body.”

Danny tried to reach up, to smack the mortician’s hands away from his face and yell, storm out of there, find his family because _clearly_ he wasn’t _dead_ , and this creep was starting to make less and less sense. His limbs felt like lead.

The mortician met his eyes properly for the first time. They were glassy, fogged over, like a dead fish lying in ice at the grocery story. “One function at a time, kid.”

Pain exploded in his chest, the first real feeling since he’d woken up this place, a billion pinpoints of white-hot agony streaking through his limbs. The mortician jerked away, blinking their dead eyes--

*

A paramedic pulled the defibrillator paddles away from his chest, looking to someone else in the back of the rocking ambulance, the ringing in his ears drowning out whatever she was saying. Slowly, Danny lifted his arm. His movements felt sluggish and delayed, like he was lagging behind himself. Black, branching lines of his own burnt skin fanned out along his arm. His vision spun, and his arm dropped back to the gurney.

Sam had egged him into posing inside his parents’ new project, some giant aperture opening up to a closet like space filled with wires and dials measuring something or other. Whatever theory his parents had that week on ghosts or interdimensional travel. She had wanted a picture, thought the whole thing looked cool. “Like something out of  _ Event Horizon _ ,” she had said, her grin infectious.

“Whatever your parents are trying to do down here, they have some  _ serious _ hardware.” Tucker had practically squealed in delight upon seeing it all. The basement was supposed to be off limits, but in their haste to chase after some ghost their equipment was displaying, Jack and Maddie Fenton had left the basement door wide open.

“I think they’re trying to, what did they call this shit- they have a theory about alternate dimensions being where ghosts come from.” Danny had snorted as he and Sam pried the doors open to the portal. “They’re trying to access it, I think.”

“Doesn’t your mom have a degree in quantum physics?” Sam had raised an eyebrow as Danny leaned against a part of the machines that didn’t look like they’d break.

“Yep, so the theory probably isn’t  _ totally _ wrong,” he conceded.

The shutter sound of Sam’s phone went off, echoing a little too loud off all the weird things in the basement.

“Dude,” Tucker said, popping up from behind Sam with an armful of weird tools.

“I told you not to touch anything-” Danny said. Tucker cut him off excitedly.

“You said your parents got you and Jazz jumpsuits, right? To try and get you into the whole ghost thing?”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

“You should put it on and act like you’re working on that thing!”

“Why would I do that! You two have enough blackmail material on me already!” He was going for the locker in the corner of the room already, though. Their excitement was contagious. “Look away, it won’t fit over my jeans.”

Tucker gasped dramatically, swooning into Sam. “No, my delicate sensitivities!  _ Nudity! _ ”

“Oh my god, shut up!” Sam rolled her eyes, bodily shoving him off, but she was smiling.

They tousled back and forth as Danny changed, zipping the stark black and white jumpsuit up to his neck. He tried to give his friends a classic snap-finger-guns, but the gloves just gave a dull, plasticky  _ fup _ that made them start laughing all over again.

He had gotten back into the portal, found a suitable looking area, and--

White.

The horrible, agonizing pain of being electrocuted spiked along the burns, as his memories finally filtered in, his numb limbs twitching.

“Mom n’ Dad are gonna  _ kill _ me,” he slurred to himself before losing consciousness once more.

*

Recovery was a blur. The first few days, it was hard to keep his eyes open, his sleep intercut with overly vivid dreams of wandering the hospital. He remembered his parents, Jazz, Sam and Tucker, and an army of doctors. He didn't know if he couldn’t recognize them after the first few days because they kept changing, or if it was something wrong with his head.

They ran a battery of tests. He kept hearing things about his heartbeat, his brainwaves, his breathing. Nurses threw him sidelong glances, expressions he couldn’t quite identify playing over their face before turning away, hurrying off to do something else, somewhere else.

A week after he was admitted, he was transferred to somewhere else in the hospital, the tests got more specific and the questions weirder.

And then he was sent home, three weeks after the accident, the doctor patting him on the back and commenting on how lucky he is to have survived with so few complications.

Danny felt like if there had been so few complications, maybe he shouldn’t have been in the hospital for so long. By the second week, he’d felt almost completely better. The burns had even stopped hurting. He wrote it off as just being a doctor kind of thing.

Still, an awful lot of bloodwork for an electrocution.

*

Maybe “completely better” was an overstatement.

Being in the hospital with so little to do, he hadn’t noticed much wrong, but trying to return to his normal life- go to school hang out with friends eat three regular meals do chores do homework deal with being thrown against the lockers- he felt  _ disconnected _ .

There was this persistent numbness, like he felt everything just a little bit less than before. Everything sounded just a bit too muffled, and the ringing in his ears just wouldn’t go away, a near silent thing that he only heard in the stillness of his bedroom at night, or during a test. If he lost focus his vision would swim, cloud over and blacken at the edges, like he was about to pass out. And, most persistently noticeable of them all, he felt like his body was  _ lagging _ , like everything he tried to do happened a second after it should.

Dash was having a  _ field day _ , with his slowed reaction time. Danny was leaving his geometry class a week after his release from the hospital, focusing a bit too intently on where he was going to place his next step. He was determined to go the whole day without tripping over himself, and so far he’d been doing a good job. Of course, his lowered guard and slowed pace made him easy pickings for everyone’s favorite juvenile delinquent.

He didn’t even realize he’d been grabbed until his back hit the lockers, the flimsy metal clamoring under him, a hand gripping his shoulder.

“Check out the Flash reject,” Dash sneered to his buddies. “Can’t even remember how to  _ walk _ .”

Danny grit his teeth and sucked in a breath. It was an effort, and didn’t really calm him down. “I’m  _ not _ in the mood for this.”

“Awww, what’s wrong? Poor little Fenton got electrocuted by his freak parents’ freak machines, boo hoo.”

He felt his eye twitch. “I knew you were a bastard, but picking on someone still in recovery? Damn, Dash, that’s low even for you.”

He was pulled away from the locker just to be smashed back into it. His head clanged into the metal, the ringing in his ears rising in pitch and volume. “Recovery my ass, you oughtta be coming here on the fucking short bus you-”

“ _ Shut up, _ ” Danny snapped, sounding more real to himself than he had in weeks. The lights overhead flared and burst with a sharp popping noise.

Dash flinched back, letting go of his shoulder. “Fucking freak! Get the hell away from me!”

Danny wanted to snipe back that Dash was the one who started this whole damn thing, but he and his cronies had fled already. The bell to sixth period rang, and with a groan, he resigned himself to being late. Again.


End file.
